IGN has posted a guide to the information currently known about the zerg race, one of three playable races in the upcoming StarCraft II. The site offers a name and description of each zerg building and unit, as well as gameplay descriptions and screenshots.

Instead of focusing on the Protoss and Terran, who have been reworked to a degree since we saw them at Blizzcon 2007, we'll talk about the newly revealed Zerg. These chitin-covered insect-like abominations start out like the other races, with a central hatchery near mineral outcroppings and a vespene gas deposit. With the handful of Drones you're given at the start, you assign some to gather minerals, another to drop an extractor on the gas to enable collection, and start saving resources for a spawning pool. Once the pool is up, Zerglings become available at the hatchery, and you can build a Queen, one of the more peculiar aspects of the Zerg's new arsenal.

Mostly, that's because the Queen builds all the base defenses. No longer will you be able to construct separate air and ground defense structures with drones. Instead, the Queen sets up little defensive nodes in your base's creep, can augment the nodes with another structure, and can heal buildings. With a fully upgraded queen, this means a lot more micromanagement on the Zerg player's part when trying to defend a base. Of course this will likely be no problem for the seasoned StarCraft fans out there who've been playing the game for 10 years, but the Zerg clearly are not intended as a starting race for someone trying to learn the ropes, perhaps more so than in the original.